Death of Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari heightens Mideast tensions

Death of Ahmed Jabari in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza could lead to an escalation that would rebound on Israel, Hamas and neighbouring Egypt.Ahmed Jabari was the most senior Hamas official to be killed since an Israeli invasion of Gaza four years ago. Jabari has long topped Israel's most-wanted list.

In Israel’s hunt for big militant fish, Ahmed Jabari was the great white shark.

The commander of Hamas’s military wing — and Israel’s most wanted man — was assassinated Wednesday in the heaviest barrage of air strikes to rock the tiny territory of Gaza in the past four years.

The attack, which included some 20 air strikes, was in retaliation for rockets fired into southern Israel over the past weeks and battles in which at least nine Israeli soldiers and civilians were injured.

His death could lead to an escalation that would rebound on Israel, Hamas and neighbouring Egypt, which earlier tried to broker a truce. It recalled earlier assassinations of dozens of top-ranking Hamas members, including its founder and spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and his successor Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

Jabari’s death, in a fiery car explosion in heavily populated Gaza City, was met with furious vows of retribution from Hamas.

The group’s spokesman Fawzi Barhoum told reporters that Israelis had “committed a dangerous crime and broke all red lines,” and that “the military occupation will regret and pay a high price.”

In Israel, alert levels were immediately raised, and residents were warned to take precautions for new rocket attacks from Gaza.

“There may be fewer casualties on the Israeli side, but we avoid that kind of equivalence,” said DJ Schneeweiss, Israel’s consul general in Toronto. “The fact is, there is no reason for any Hamas rockets to be lobbed into Israel. If someone is punching you, you have to punch them back.”

Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird said in a statement Wednesday, “we fundamentally believe that Israel has the right to defend itself and its citizens from terrorist threats.”

The Israeli military said that the purpose of its strikes on Gaza was “limited” and aimed at removing the threat to Israeli citizens. It said southern Israel has been subjected to some 800 rocket attacks in 2012, a “steep escalation” since its massive three-week assault on Gaza that began in 2008.

“If there will be a need, the military is prepared to expand the operation” against Hamas targets in Gaza, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the New York Times.

But Israel’s aim of breaking down the command and control chain of Hamas’s leadership in Gaza also carries risk.

Armed jihadist groups that are not under the control of Hamas have grown and strengthened in the past few years, striving to destabilize Gaza by escalating attacks on Israel.

“When rockets hit Israel, the Israelis will hit back at Hamas regardless of who’s launching them,” says Jeffrey White, a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

But Israel can also use its intelligence to downgrade the capability of the main armed jihadist groups that would only gain from Hamas’s losses, he added.

Although Hamas is the best armed and best trained militant group in the Palestinian territories, its chief allies Syria and Iran are in chaos or economic decline. It also faces bitter enmity from rival Fatah, which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007.

Newer militant groups have since sprung up. Some are believed to have planned or abetted this year’s attacks along the Sinai border that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers and left one Israeli citizen dead.

The timing of the recent escalation between Israel and Hamas is especially bad for Egypt, whose new Muslim Brotherhood-led government is still shaky. Although the Egyptian military has a firm hold on power, its leadership is in transition, and its command less stable.

Earlier this week, Egypt tried to broker a truce between the two combatants, who appeared to be nearing agreement. But Wednesday’s air strikes, and the killing of Jabari, dampened hope for an early resolution and undercut the Egyptian government’s attempt to promote domestic as well as international stability.

Hamas has long-established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose political arm denounced the assassination on its Facebook page as “a crime that requires a quick Arab and international response to stem these massacres against the besieged Palestinian people.”

The upsurge of anger among Islamists puts new Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi between a muscular Israel and the wrath of his own party. On Wednesday he withdrew Egypt’s ambassador to Israel and called for a meeting of the UN Security Council. A closed emergency session was set for 9 p.m. Wednesday.

“He’s in a hard spot now,” says Andrew McGregor of the Jamestown Foundation, a Toronto-based expert on the Egyptian military. “He can’t do anything to confront the Israelis because the army is a giant behemoth, but it hasn’t (gone to war) since 1973.”

Morsi has strong reasons for appeasing his allies, McGregor said: “The economy is in the tank, the police aren’t on the street, the people are fed up, and if there ever was a honeymoon, it’s coming to an end very quickly.”

With files from Star wire services

An Israeli airstrike killed the commander of the military wing of Gaza's Hamas rulers Wednesday, Hamas officials and Israel confirmed, in a dramatic resumption of Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian militant leaders.

Ahmed Jabari was the most senior Hamas official to be killed since an Israeli invasion of Gaza four years ago. Jabari has long topped Israel's most-wanted list. Israel blamed him for in a string of attacks, including the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit in 2006.

Israel said the assassination marked the beginning of an offensive. It was followed by a string of airstrikes around Gaza.

On its Twitter feed, the Israeli military said it could be escalated further. “All options are on the table. If necessary, the (Israeli military) is ready to initiate a ground operation in Gaza,” it said.

Israeli officials said earlier that they were considering assassinating top Hamas officials following a wave of rocket fire from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip at southern Israel, triggering Israeli airstrikes that killed six Palestinians. The exchanges appeared to be waning on Tuesday.

The killing of Jabari seemed likely to re-ignite the flare-up. Palestinians called for punishing retaliation.

Witnesses said Jabari was travelling in a vehicle in Gaza City when the car exploded. Crowds of people and security personnel rushed to the scene of the strike, trying to put out the fire that had engulfed the car and left it a charred shell.

Hamas police cordoned off the area around a hospital where at least one body from the strike was taken. It was draped in a white sheet, with a burned leg poking out. Hamas said another man was killed in the airstrike. Hamas police said three other airstrikes hit other targets in Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah.

Plumes of black smoke wafted into Gaza City's skies following at least five airstrikes, in atmosphere reminiscent of Israel's large scale 2008-2009 attack on Gaza. Ambulance sirens blared as people ran in panic in the streets and militants fired angrily into the air.

“After a couple of days on ongoing rocket attacks toward Israeli civilians the (Israeli military) chief of staff has authorized to open an operation against terror targets in the Gaza Strip,” military spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovitch said.

She said Jabari had “a lot of bloods of his hands” and that the military chief “authorized different targets” as well.

Shortly after, she said Israeli aircraft targeted 20 locations in Gaza that served as storage or launching sites for rockets. Among the weapons destroyed were rockets that could hit as far as 40 kilometres into Israel.

Advocates say targeted killings are an effective deterrent without the complications associated with a ground operation, chiefly civilian and Israeli troop casualties. Proponents argue they also prevent future attacks by removing their masterminds.

Critics say the killings invite retaliation by militants and encourage them to try to assassinate Israeli leaders. They complain that the strikes amount to extrajudicial killings.

Dovish Israeli lawmaker Dov Hanin condemned the killing.

“Assassinating leaders is never the solution. In place of the leaders killed, other will grow, and we will only get another cycle of fire and blood,” he said.

During a wave of suicide bombings against Israel a decade ago, the country employed the tactic to eliminate the upper echelon of Hamas leadership.

During that period, Israeli aircraft assassinated the previous commander of Hamas' military wing, Salah Shehadeh, the movement's founder and spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, and dozens of other Hamas military commanders.

The practice set off a continuous wave of criticism from rights groups and foreign governments, particularly the strike that killed Shehadeh — a one-ton bomb that killed 14 other people, most of them children.

Israeli opposition leader Shaul Mofaz, a former chief of staff who has supported targeted killings, welcomed the strike.

“We need to continue this policy, to find them in every place,” he told Israel's Army Radio. “Israel needs to determine the agenda, not Jabari.”

Mofaz served as military chief of staff and defence minister when Israel carried out the earlier wave of assassinations. He and other former senior defence officials contend these killings left the Hamas leadership in disarray and put a halt to the rash of Hamas suicide bombings that killed hundreds of Israelis.

Mofaz warned that Israelis should expect an escalation of violence in the coming days following the assassination.

Jabari was known in Israel as the man who accompanied Schalit when the high-profile prisoner swap took place last October. Schalit, who was captured in a cross-border raid from Gaza that killed two other soldiers, was swapped for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including more than 300 convicted killers.

Jabari, nicknamed Abu Mohammed, was born in 1960 in the eastern Gaza neighbourhood of Shejaiya. In 2006, he became the acting commander of the military wing of Hamas after his predecessor, Muhammad Deif, was seriously wounded in an Israeli attack.

Jabari began as a member of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, but switched his allegiance to Hamas after serving 13 years in an Israeli prison.

He survived four previous attempts by Israel to kill him. In one attempt in 2004 his eldest son, his brother and three other relatives were killed.

He was credited with leading the bloody 2007 takeover of Gaza from Fatah forces, developing Hamas's military arsenal and its networks in Iran, Sudan and Lebanon and for his planning of the Schalit kidnapping. Hamas has ruled Gaza with an iron grip since then, and repeated attempts to reconcile with Fatah have failed.

The assassination threatened to further damage Israel's relations with Egypt, which is governed by Hamas' ideological counterpart, the Muslim Brotherhood.

On its official Facebook page, the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, called the assassination a “crime that requires a quick Arab and international response to stem these massacres against the besieged Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”

It accused Israel of trying to “drag the region toward instability.”

Israel and Egypt signed a peace accord in 1979. Relations, never warm, have deteriorated since longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising last year.